I think the big question here is still where we land. It could easily be somewhere in the 20-30k range.

Love this idea. I think we should also make sure that we are keeping broader fediverse compatibility in mind. Particularly kbin and mastodon.

Some interest specific instances that I haven’t seen here so far:
slrpnk.net
fanaticus.social
mander.xyz

There’s also a brand new currently unfederated instance for legal professionals at links.esq.social

The way I see it there are 2 paths forward for Lemmy. Without at least one of these scenarios occuring it seems unlikely that we’ll get back to a level of natural growth.

1. Reddit starts fucking up again. If this happens it’ll probably be because of or sometime around the IPO so be on the lookout for that.
2. We start getting significant user growth from other fediverse platforms, likely Mastodon. These users already understand how federation works and are actively looking for a lot of the features that Lemmy has to offer on their existing platforms. I think the way to get there is primarily through topic dedicated instances springing up as professional groups find Mastodon does not truly fit their needs. One recent example of this is links.esq.social which is a brand new currently unfederated instance for lawyers and legal professionals.

These things absolutely can be fixed in an update but I think we both know the devs have no intention of going in that direction.

We do need to continue growing at a natural but sustained rate. 50-60k is not a healthy place to stop and there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit development-wise.

Nope. There be trolls over there.

What was your old username? Would be helpful to look you up in the modlogs

Last I heard Lemmy devs are explicitly against this. Mastodon users can still make top level posts over here but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.

All good. If I had any artistic talent myself I would have put something else together but alas. If anybody’s got something cute and free hit me up!

As an example. This is the sort of post I’m talking about: https://tech.lgbt/@spaduf/110941439731236455

@bookstodon Not sure if this is anybody’s cup of tea but there’s a new Lemmy instance dedicated to books and writing over at: https://literature.cafe

The best part is you can participate from your existing fediverse account. Communities on Lemmy can be followed like users and have similar functionality to a.gup.pe groups!

Try following @fiction as an example but remember that federation doesn’t backfill.

More communities can be found here: https://literature.cafe/communities

Already sitting at about 8 boosts and several favorites from some folks with a fairly large follower count. That means potentially thousands of eyes. I went ahead and put together a dedicated user as I think that may be more appropriate than spam posting Lemmy communities/instances on my personal account. Not sure when I’ll have time to flesh it out and make it active but I’ve already got a list of communities/instances and what groups I think would be interested in them. Find it here:
https://mastodon.social/@lemmy_for_mastodon

That’s why I’m specifically suggesting we try to get them on the specialized instances. Where culture and moderation policies are least similar from Reddit. Somebody else pointed this out in the other thread and I do absolutely think if we don’t point them to a specialized instances then beehaw is the place to go.

What does that mean for those of us who never got into IRC?

I’m not sure there’s really anything wrong with what’s going on now but it does seem that new users from Reddit in particular have all but dried up. Long term this will definitely be a problem. Mastodon provides a userbase in the low millions to potentially tap into and they already understand federation. Strikes me as low hanging fruit that has a lot more value than the average reddit user.

One big issue with the existing cross-posting feature is that it does not work AT ALL with text based posts, just links.

I don’t think the folks that have those sorts of qualms are necessarily the people to go after. I think the prime targets should be field experts. They were essential in establishing Reddit’s utility in the early days and there seem to be a fairly significant number of them over on Mastodon in search of deeper conversation.

Some easily shared graphics would still be super useful.

I really think medium broad-topic instances are the way to go. Similar in scope to lemmy.film or lemdro.id

See this thread: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2196821

My thesis is basically that new users are not coming from Reddit anymore, but Mastodon users are both searching for group-like features and are likely to be positive influences over here. I’m saying they can be particularly useful in bootstrapping specialized instances (lemmy.film, literature.cafe, etc) and establishing a culture that differs from the wider threadiverse with fairly minimal advertising over on Mastodon. For the most part, if you are not already a Mastodon user or a community/instance mod you do not need to worry about this.